The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have made it possible for enterprises to sell products and services by using the WWW to describe offers, using various means such as WWW forms or electronic mail to conduct transactions. This form of selling is based around the catalogue model that originated in the 19th Century, where the WWW site substitutes for the paper catalogue, and the postal service is replaced by the modern online equivalent.
Many enterprises currently use the telephone to replace or augment the catalogue model. A customer can call the organisation and purchase goods and services interactively over the telephone. This has the advantage that a customer can interact directly with a Customer Service Representative (“CSR”), but has the disadvantage that the telephone is a non-visual medium.
The need to handle large numbers of customers simultaneously, and the concurrent need to manage a pool of CSRs, has led to the development of the call centre, and the development of specialised software control packages to determine how incoming customer calls are routed to CSRs.
It is possible to combine the catalogue model of WWW selling with the telephone call centre (and other communication channels) to produce what is often called contact centre.
The contact centre is like a telephone call centre, but instead of CSRs handling only telephone calls, they may be expected to handle customer communications in a variety of formats: FAX, electronic mail, telephone and WWW are typical. A contact centre is characterised by multiple contact or communication channels, and a pool of CSRs who interact with customers to provide services, products or support. The contact centre provides the illusion of a single point of contact for customers on a regional, national or even international basis. U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,143 (Geotel Communications) discloses a contact center capable of handling both traditional telephone calls and Internet calls where, in the case of the latter, the customer contact can involve multimedia exchanges.
When a customer is browsing the Web and wants help, one option is to make use of the public telephone system for customer-CSR communication rather than text chat. A further option is for the contact center to dial-back the customer at a later time (for various reasons, e.g. contact center congestion, customer preference, or to avoid the customer paying for the call). This is the deferred callback service. In this service the customer browsing the Web requests help, submits some information, including a telephone number and the dial-back delay, and is called back at the specified time.
When the contact center calls back the customer, it will often be desirable to enhance (or indeed, replace) the telephone exchange with communication over the internet because of the richness of media types that can be transmitted over the internet. Whilst some time may have passed (several hours) since the original deferred callback request was made, the customer will still expect that any details initially communicated at the time the deferred callback was set up will have been noted and that the set up of a network communication session will be accomplished with the minimum of inconvenience to the customer.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and service system for facilitating the set up of a deferred communication session via the internet or other network.